Breakfast was a nail-biting affair: coffee, oatmeal, and AWOS ("Automated Weather Observation Service") on the telephone every ten minutes. The last report before I left the house at 7:45 am was winds running 310 (forty degrees off the runway) at 9 knots.

I’m currently signed off for ten knots.

I’d been thinking about it really hard, and concluded that if I didn’t at least go take a look at it, I would regret it. This is edgy territory.

There are damned good reasons why a taildragger instructor limits her students’ wind minimums. For one thing: because of the way a tail-wheeled airplane’s center-of-gravity is arranged, it has a tendency to "weathervane". Left alone on the ground without pilot control, it will be blown around to nose into the wind. This tendency is always present; during taxi, on takeoff and landing rolls. The higher the wind, the stronger the weathervaning tendency. In an airplane as light as the Citabria (1650 pounds max), it’s quite possible for winds to overwhelm the pilots’ controls. When the winds are over 30 knots, Terri won’t even let the airplane out of the hangar.

The challenge is most acute on landing. Above a certain level of wind strength, the technique calls for the upwind wing to be banked into the wind all the way down to touchdown, with the upwind wheel touching down first.

So; let’s say the landing runway is 25. That means its compass heading is 250, or 20 degrees south of due west. Let’s say the winds are running 340. That means they’re running directly across the runway from right to left as the airplane lands. This landing will call for banking the right wing down (into the wind), holding directional heading straight down the runway with rudder pedals, and touching the right mainwheel down first.

All this happens in what’s known as a "wheel landing". At first glance, "wheel landing" probably seems a fairly odd reference. After all: what the hell else would one land an airplane on except its wheels?

The concept is exclusive to taildraggers, and it’s different from a traditional "three-point landing". The three-pointer involves slowly and carefully pitching the nose of the airplane up at a very low altitude above the runway: less than five feet or so, depending on the airplane. As the nose pitches up, with power off, the airplane slows to the point where it simply stops flying. The pitch attitude and airspeed are played very carefully at the edge of the stall (the point where air no longer flows smoothly over the wing to develop lift) so that the stall does not fully "break" - with the nose falling through and pitching down, which would be be disastrous so close to the runway.

It’s a constant dance of airspeed and attitude until the airplane settles on all three wheels at once, with the tailwheel down in the same attitude at which it sits when it’s parked.

A wheel landing is very different.

In a wheel landing, the airplane is flown onto the runway under power, instead of stalling it on without power, and the two mainwheels touch down first. Once that’s done, power is taken out while the airplane is held down on the runway. This is done by keeping the wings at a very low, or perfectly flat, angle-of-attack (AOA) in order to not develop lift: the tail of the airplane is kept off the runway to flatten the AOA until speed bleeds off below that needed for flight.

The technique is designed for managing wind conditions, and especially gusts. Wind gusts can play hell with airflow over the wing, resulting in dramatic increases or decreases in lift, neither of which are very helpful near the ground. A rule of thumb is to carry normal landing airspeed over the runway threshold, plus half the speed of peak gusts.

There are all kinds of "rules of thumb" involved in landing airplanes, but here’s the way it breaks: joystick, rudder pedals, and throttle are all in constant action, every which way, until the airplane is down and bleeding airspeed to braking range. This cardinal bottom line applies to all airplanes, but it’s extraordinarily crucial in taildraggers, just because they’re so susceptible to winds. Landing a stick and rudder taildragger in winds is a task that approaches the very-most edges of pilot ability: never stopping; always feeling, through the controls and with eyes and ears; always moving in three axes at once as the constantly surging and waning flow of air rolls over and around the airplane’s surfaces with emphases and directions changing every fraction of a second.

All pilots landing in wind conditions are constantly dancing with the air: an invisible partner always looking for a way to trip them in the dance, and make them crash.

Taildragger pilots dance with tigers on their backs. In calm winds, the tiger lies softly upon them, purring and relaxed (but watching for an opportunity to break the tail out of control and wreck everything). On windy days, the tiger is crouched, with claws digging into the pilot’s shoulders, and eyeing his throat. The stronger the winds, or the more angled-off the runway heading, the closer the fangs to a clench at a vital spot, and the closer disaster lurks.

The taildragger pilot’s job is to learn to pet the tiger in a way that it prefers, and keep it calm, even when it’s slavering for blood.

Some pilots of nosewheeled airplanes sometimes don’t take kindly to these facts. In some, the manifest difference between the two types of airplanes seems to strike at their self-esteem or something like that. Now and then, they don’t like it when a taildragger pilot points out the facts of matters.

I should have had one of those types in the back seat, this morning. I would have been intrigued to hand-off the airplane, to make the point.

By the time I had 53883 fired up and rolling, the tower was reporting 11 knots at 340, with runway 25 active. That was one knot over my sign-off, and 90 degrees off the runway: directly crosswind. Wind was variable in both speed and direction, though, and there isn’t anything else to say:

I felt like I could manage it.

That’s probably an audacious thing to say, but I didn’t conclude on it lightly.

As I said above: this is edgy territory.

What’s the difference between 10 knots and 11?

Well, one very clear thing on my mind right now is that Terri said "10". She’s out of town today, and I’m going to have to tell her all about this when she gets home. I hope she won’t be angry with me, but I won’t have a leg to stand on if she is. I suppose I’ll just try to prop-up that bridge when I get to it.

The next thing, though, is that I never would have taken off if I wasn’t confident in my ability, and that’s where another admission is due: I knew that the winds would increase to 15. I’d been watching every weather resource I could get my hands on, and I’d seen the pressure gradients. Briefly put: I knew which way the wind was blowing.

I wanted to try it. On taxi-out, I passed J.W. holding short of my taxiway in a Cessna 172. He called me on the radio: "Uhm, 883, it’s pretty rough out there."

I answered, "Yup, I’ve been over this with Cal [Terri’s husband], and if I don’t like it immediately, I’m turning right around."

"Roger that."

Takeoff went by the modified numbers: climbing out at 80 instead of 70 mph, with the right wing held sternly down into the crosswind in order to stay on the runway course without blowing off to the left. I was cleared for immediate southern departure, and turned left at normal altitude.

I’d started my stop-watch at the beginning of the takeoff roll. My plan included gathering time-to-altitude data for future flight planning, as well as a flight out to the gravel quarry south of the field, and then a left turn to a heading of 060 (east-northeast) to fly up to Winder for touch and goes. Before I got to the quarry, I already knew I wasn’t going to be shooting T&G’s at Winder. I thought I would practice ground reference maneuvers in the winds.

I hit the quarry on time and dead on the nose, and took the turn to 060. That put me just about directly crosswind from the left, now, and I watched the course drift to the right over ground reference points. I flew a couple of miles, increasingly adding crosswind correction to hold the course. Before I was done, I was holding about 30 degrees of correction. That means that in order to fly along a course of 060, I had to point the airplane 30 degrees to the left: 030.

I had never tuned away from Gwinnett tower’s radio frequency, and I heard wind reports for a succession of flights taking off. When I heard winds running 15 knots at 340, I said, "That’s it," and swung a turn to the west back to the airport. I’d been in the air about fifteen minutes.

Gwinnett tower directed me to enter the pattern on a left base for runway 25 and to report at two miles. I started letting down at three miles, keeping an eye out for the Army helicopter approaching from the east. I entered the base leg as directed, and turned a very nice square turn to final, with the tiger settling on my shoulders.

At 1500 feet the wind really wanted to dance hard & fast, and it never let up until I touched down. For almost a full minute, I was almost frantically active in the cockpit keeping in touch with it. I say, "almost" because that’s what it might have looked like to anyone watching me, but I was never out of touch with it. It was simply *very* busy.

A gust of wild directional variation stripped a lot of lift off my wings at one point, with a sinking feeling like a broken elevator for about 25 feet, but the Citabria flew right on through to proper air under the wings, with only the tiger remaining and tensing for the final play. I brought 80 mph over the runway threshold, normally far too fast, but now only a tad fast for these conditions. I wanted the extra energy in that tossing ocean of air.

I was able to generally average the proper right-wing-down attitude all the way to touchdown, and the right wheel actually kissed fairly lightly. I was happy about that, but it wasn’t over by a long shot. On a 6000-foot runway, I spent at least 750 feet lightly bouncing one wheel, then the other, then two (you pick’ em out of the three total), then all three, then three again after the bounce, etc., all the way along bleeding airspeed and petting the tiger.

I wasn’t relieved, exactly, but I was happy and gratified with the whole effort when I finally tapped the brakes and pulled off at taxiway Charlie more than halfway up the runway. The tower guy was straight-up pro when he gave me clearance to pull off and taxi back to Echo and hold short of the runway, but I’m sure he was happy to see me down.

What I did not know at the moment was that J.W. had gotten in his truck and driven over to the tower, where he sat waiting for my return. "I kinda knew you’d be coming back," he later said, "And I wanted to watch this. I’ll tell you what: I’m not sure if that was a wheel landing or a three-pointer, but it doesn’t matter. You kept flying it all the way, and that’s the only way to make it work."

Total time logged: .6 hour (36 minutes), with one landing, and the tiger caged.